Sunday, 29 March 2015

When I’m riding my bike home in the evenings and have come
down the long, spiral ramp off the ManhattanBridge into Brooklyn,
I often find myself waiting at a pedestrian crossing nearly right under the
bridge’s first girders. Given that the bridge carries four busy subway tracks
as well as three roadways, a pedestrian path and a bike path, that means I
frequently hear the ear-splitting din of a B, D, N or Q train crossing just
above my head.

An unexpected source of syncopated rhythm: the bike path
under the Manhattan Bridge's Brooklyn end

But the noise’s effect isn’t what one might imagine. A joint
in the tracks means that the wheels produce an exquisitely syncopated rhythm.
A-ONE-and-a-two-and-THREE-and-a-four clack the four successive axles as the
joins between the cars roll overhead. The rhythm is so compelling that
sometimes, when no-one’s looking, I permit myself a little dance with my
shoulders.

My jiggling shoulders generally prompt a second thought,
however. The sound turns my mind to how cyclists in cities like New York or London
or anywhere else where cycling’s an on-road, minority activity, have to attend closely
to the rhythm of the city around them. In such an unforgiving environment, it's vital to pick up the cues from
the surrounding, constantly-changing city about when and where to cycle fast and
confidently and when to exercise maximum caution and restraint.

Call it snirt, call it snarbage: we New York City cyclists
have been dodging a lot of snowy, rubbishy mounds like
this in the last few weeks and months.

Many of the patterns I've come to recognise are things that restrict me. During the recent long, bitter winter, for example, I noticed myself
learning after each snowfall the distinctive pattern of snow clearance and how
it affected each cycle lane and where I positioned myself on the road. An event
like last week’s sad gas explosion and fire in the EastVillage
will suddenly paralyse traffic across vast swathes of the city. Light rain
after a dry spell makes surfaces particularly treacherous – especially, ironically,
those painted with the rather slippery green paint the city uses to mark cycle
lanes.

Yet there’s a pleasure, after two-and-a-half years and at
least 10,000 miles of New York City cycling, to having learned to recognise –
and anticipate – so many of the city’s moods. The sudden surges in traffic in
various places; traffic’s unexplained disappearance in others; the surge in
grumpiness among drivers in certain conditions: all reflect, I know rationally,
a multitude of individual decisions. But they can feel so concerted and sudden
that they almost feel like the actions of New York City herself. A cyclist riding through the city
has to undertake a kind of dance with her, getting in step and learning how she
moves.

That makes all the more enjoyable those moments of bliss one
experiences from time to time riding a bicycle – the moments when the city
seems to slip by and it is the other forms of transport that seem momentarily
absurd.

The kind of weather that's slowing me down particularly
dramatically at present: Fifth Avenue in a light rain shower,
perfect for creating a treacherous surface

There is, nevertheless, a dissenting voice inside my head that
wonders how much I’m dressing this phenomenon up. I sometimes wonder if my
having got to know the city better simply means I’m growing more fearful. I
notice how I’m increasingly stopping to let cars past on the narrowest roads
where I know drivers are most aggressive. I’m less often taking the middle of
the lane and forcing them to slow down to, say, a 20mph crawl in a 20mph limit.
I noticed myself easing off significantly on my speed in some recent rain
showers, feeling that the streets, still greasy with the detritus of winter,
might be particularly treacherous. I find myself waiting behind motor vehicles
as lines of other cyclists slip through narrow gaps between them and parked
cars or the kerb.

Perhaps, a voice in my head says, I'm feeling the
familiarity of the bullied with the bully. Maybe I’ve let the city’s toughness
beat me into mental submission.

The dissenting voice grew particularly loud on March 23 when
I had to cycle from home first thing in the morning to a conference right by
the south-eastern corner of Central Park. I
tried to fall in step with the city. I used my knowledge of the position of the
many new potholes that have appeared over the winter to decide when to dodge
out of the cycle lane and into the car lanes. I used my experience of the weather
to look out for the inevitable ice patches, products of a mixture of the cold
and a hundred little thoughtless sloshings out of buckets into the cold street
or spillings of drinks.

New York's Metropolitan Club: maginficent inside - but
a devil of a place to cycle to.

Already feeling slightly ill before I started, however, I began
to feel a little defeated. The corner I was visiting – 5th Avenue and East 60th St
– is one of New York’s
least accessible by bike for anyone arriving from the south. Having prided
myself on finding a viable but unconventional bike route up 1st avenue
to 55th street then up Park Avenue to 60th – I found
myself dismounting and pushing rather than deal with the gridlock (and yet more
ice patches) on Park Avenue.

The experience was a useful reminder that, in an ideal New York City, there
would be no real skill to cycling in step with the city’s gyrations. Far more
experiences would be like riding along the best sections of the Hudson River
Greenway – a chance to travel quickly around New York, put no strain on the city’s
environment or infrastructure yet take in the city’s excitement. I was torn
between cursing three things: my own cowardice in intimidating conditions, the
city’s unwillingness to provide a joined-up cycling network and my own stubborn
refusal to give up cycling in the face of these facts.

The Queensboro Bridge: where my journey started to go right.

Yet, as I pondered at the end of the day how to get home after my unpromising outbound trip, I
realised I was only a few blocks from the QueensboroBridge
and its bike path. I set off and was soon barrelling at nearly 25mph down the
bridge into Queens, under the elevated subway tracks then over another bridge
into Brooklyn.

I covered the route, though it was long, quickly and
efficiently. I took routes through Greenpoint and Park Slope that I’d devised
only after many attempts and much trial-and-error. I was able to enjoy the
grandeur of the panoramas over the East River
and take in the city’s details. I saw the Polish shops in Greenpoint, the
Yiddish writing on the buses for Hassidic Jewish schoolchildren in South
Williamsburg and the soul food restaurants run by African-Americans in FortGreene.

I grew briefly frustrated with a cluster of visiting-hour cars
outside MethodistHospital on 6th St
in Park Slope but soon slipped past them too and sped, unmolested, down the
hill towards home.

It was, in short, the kind of rare, transcendentally
enjoyable trip that explains my refusal to give up. It’s the kind of experience
I may, if anyone asks me soon if he or she should cycle in the city, recount as
evidence for the “yes” side.

But I probably won’t dare articulate my true feeling about
how such a near-perfect journey feels. In my head, New York City and I were, for that hour or
so, spinning and whirling across the dancefloor in a rare, elegantly-executed
and ecstatic waltz.

Friday, 20 March 2015

It was one morning at the end of January in TriBeCa that I
encountered the very personification of motorist arrogance. As I rode down a
single block of Reade St
that was still mostly clogged with snow, I used the middle of the lane to
signal that there was no room to pass me safely. But a block of driving more
slowly was unthinkable for a driver who was approaching me from behind in his
Lexus SUV. He first leant on his horn to try to bully me out of the way then
swerved into the parking lane and passed me close and fast on my right.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” I screamed at him as I,
inevitably, caught up with him at the next traffic lights. “There was a bike
lane!” he yelled back as though that were some kind of explanation. “It was
full of snow,” I screamed back.

A Brooklyn bike lane after one recent snowfall. The angry
Lexus driver of TriBeCa wants me to ride in such lanes
and get myself out of his way.

The driver was one of the scores, possibly hundreds, I’ve
encountered over more than two decades of urban cycling whose anger at my presence
on the road went far beyond what any actual hold-up or inconvenience at my
being on the road might justify. My making a different transport choice seemed
to present an existential affront.

The tendency would exist, I’m sure, without Top Gear, the BBC-made show that
presents such motorist arrogance as entertaining, clever and part of the
natural order of things. But the show, which is syndicated or remade in nearly
every country around the world, gives such views far more legitimacy than they
would otherwise enjoy. Any number of mind-numbing cable shows and irresponsible
adverts feed similar thinking among many US motorists.

Broadcasting House: who wouldn't make their
point by driving an armoured vehicle here?

I’ve consequently found it depressing how much support
Jeremy Clarkson, Top Gear’s star and
chief boor, has attracted since he was suspended on March 10 from work on the
show after a “fracas” – a British way of saying he apparently punched a
producer. A petition demanding his reinstatement – started by Guido Fawkes, a
political blog – attracted nearly 1m signatures. It was, tastefully, delivered
to the BBC’s Broadcasting House in a tracked armoured vehicle. Clarkson’s suspension
seems as much of a threat to some people’s sense of themselves as my cycling in
the middle of the road was to the driver of the Lexus SUV.

But a row I had on Facebook with a friend of an old school friend
has crystallised in my mind the nature of what’s going on. The role of the
motor car appears, for better or worse, to be part of a cultural battle in many
industrialised societies.

The Top Gear
tendency among motorists is, it seems to me, part of a wider conservative predilection
for accepting certain established social facts – including the motor car’s
dominant role - as so inevitable that it’s eccentric even to question them. Top Gear seeks to celebrate the joys for
those who already have power of exercising it.

From such a
worldview, naturally, people who question the established way of doing things
are apt to look like joyless worrywarts. If one can’t see why it’s worth
questioning the promotion of high-speed motor vehicles for use in urban
environments, it must be frustrating to see people like me poring over
statistics and presenting philosophical arguments for change.

The division looks a lot like the classic one that has run
through much British politics for centuries and is replicated in many other
English-speaking societies. On one side stand care-free
conservative bon-vivants, the Cavaliers. On the other are puritanical, uptight
progressives, the Roundheads. Society’s overall view of the two sides probably
remains much as the two sides in the English Civil War are described in the
satirical history 1066 and All That. The Cavaliers are “Wrong but Wromantic,”
while the Roundheads are “Right but Repulsive.”

A Cadillac ATS at the Detroit Auto Show:
people like me seem like joyless prudes
if we suggest this maybe isn't an ideal urban car.

I stumbled into the Clarkson discussion by agreeing with an
old friend who had commented that Clarkson was “beyond ghastly” in another friend’s post about his suspension. I expressed the hope that the producer –
whom Clarkson appears to have hit because a hotel wouldn’t provide him with hot
food late at night – had excellent legal representation. I would have left it
there had not a third person – whom I don’t personally know – chimed in with a
rebuke.

“He is a legend...someone who can laugh at himself and
others,” the poster wrote of Clarkson. “Some people have had humour bypass
surgery.”

An ironic, amused detachment from events is such a critical
attribute for a British man that this was, of course, a serious charge.

The jokes are funny only if one presupposes that people’s
being different from oneself is inherently funny. They assume, variously, that
it’s intrinsically funny to use a racial slur; that some people belong to a
different culture from one’s own; that some people have a disability; or that some
people are from a less powerful bit of one’s own country. I suggested that
Clarkson was indulging in the lazy humour of the school bully, mocking weakness
and difference to denigrate them.

My reaction then became part of the joke.

“It is funny, isn’t it – especially the reaction,” the
poster replied, with problematic punctuation.

It’s probably easier, however, to recognise the problems
with Clarkson’s attitudes if one’s dealing daily with the boorish driving that
he and like-minded people, like the worst Daily News and New York Post columnists, endorse. An encomium to the joy of a high-powered vehicle seems less
entertaining if one’s just been buzzed by a muscle car with tinted
windows on an urban street. Top Gear’s admonishment to cyclists to learn the
difference between red and green traffic lights looks less self-evidently
side-splitting if one regularly sees motorists speeding at 40mph down residential
streets.

The Cavalier driver speeding and jumping lights probably feels free to do so because driving feels to him or her like a private matter. We Roundheads on the
outside tend to suck our teeth and worry about how driving on a street means
taking part in a complex social transaction. At high speeds one has
far less scope to adjust to how other people act - and a far greater chance of
harming them.

A crossroads in Long Beach, California, suggests to me that
car-dominated spaces can have drawbacks - which probably
makes me a joyless worrywart.

The heavy use of cars in cities presents real moral dilemmas. It’s vital that people who want to think seriously about that aren’t
mocked into silence by boors.

Yet I’ve concluded from the Clarkson episode, my Facebook
argument about it and countless other expressions of support for inconsiderate
driving that there’s an asymmetric battle under way. Advocates for change often
earnestly wheel out studies and campaigns as if it were enough to have a better
case and better arguments. There are, however, millions of people for whom even
the notion of a serious discussion about such matters seems to be beside the
point. The first battle has to be against the very assumption that any effort
to change or examine the current state of affairs is absurd in itself.

The Clarkson episode is also further proof that what people
think and say are closely linked to how they actually act. While Clarkson is
often defended as a harmless japester, there has long been a singularly nasty
whiff around his behaviour. In January 2014, for
example, he tweeted a picture of a cyclist on the narrow backstreets of Chelsea, West London,
taking the lane and commented how it was “middle-of-the-road pointmakers like
this” who made drivers so angry with cyclists. A person claiming to be the cyclist
– who was riding absolutely correctly given the nature of the streets – later claimed
that Clarkson forced him off the road by passing when there was insufficient
room.

The incident that provoked the latest controversy,
meanwhile, apparently involved an angry confrontation. Many accounts suggest
that Clarkson called Oisin Tymon, the producer, a “lazy Irish c***” and punched him, splitting his lip. That would suggest a still darker side to Clarkson’s
enthusiasm for xenophobic slurs, although he seems to deny either speaking
xenophobically or punching the producer.

The most important lesson, finally, may be that large
numbers of people are nasty, callous and lack a moral compass. Oisin Tymon
appears at the very least to have been badly bullied at work by a far more powerful
individual. He may also have been subject to slurs on his ethnicity and an
assault that resulted in his going to hospital for his injuries. The response
of nearly a million people in the UK to this has been to demand that
the perpetrator be allowed unconditionally to return to his job. A significant minority
has added to the victim’s suffering by abusing him online. A glance at any
online US media report about
the death of a cyclist will confirm there’s no shortage of similar scorn for
weaker road users on the Atlantic’s western shore.

If that’s what it looks like to be wrong but wromantic in
2015, I’m more willing than ever to accept being repulsive but right.

Update, March 25:
The BBC has decided - using unfortunately mealy-mouthed language - not to renew Jeremy Clarkson's contract. An internal investigation found that he harangued Oisin Tymon for a prolonged period and assaulted him for 30 seconds. Thinking he had lost his job as a result of Clarkson's anger, he drove himself to hospital. The BBC's report and the decision to suspend Clarkson's contract has had the predictable - but depressing - effect of making many of Clarkson's fans furious with Clarkson's victim.

About Me

I'm a hefty, 6ft 5in Scot. I moved back to London in 2016 after four years of living and cycling in New York City. Despite my size, I have a nearly infallible method of making myself invisible. I put on an eye-catching helmet, pull on a high visibility jacket, reflective wristbands and trouser straps, get on a light blue touring bicycle and head off down the road. I'm suddenly so hard to see that two drivers have knocked me off because, they said, they didn't see me.
This blog is an effort to explain to some of the impatient motorists stuck behind me, puzzled friends and colleagues and - perhaps most of all myself - why being a cyclist has become almost as important a part of my identity as far more important things - my role as a husband, father, Christian and journalist. It seeks to do so by applying the principles of moral philosophy - which I studied for a year at university - and other intellectual disciplines to how I behave on my bike and how everyone uses roads.